an interactive performance lecture exploring systems modelling

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Nikki

This week has been an ‘in the forest’ kind of week. It’s sort of comforting (in an icky, uncomfortable kind of way) because it means that we’re not just skimming the surface and coming up with the obvious stuff. We’ve also all sort of become more expert in our own specific interest area. It’s important when we’re making games that we have these different perspectives and little pockets of information because it means the games have more complexity, color and reach. But it’s not a totally fun experience.

This week I have been mostly looking at the hazard communication organization and roll out for Pinatubo in 1991. So it’s been interesting to realize the disaster planning and management that occurs (ideally) in that area and also what the issues are. Part of that is also realizing that even with excellent delineation of tasks and good planning things can go wrong, unforeseen things happen (even weeks or months after an event) and that not everyone understands things in the same way. In a great example today we heard from Adam Switzer about the term ‘higher ground’. To some people that means get to the top of the nearest mountain – when it might just mean get to the 3rd or 4th or 5th story of a building – or vice versa. It’s this kind of complexity and understanding of language and concepts that this whole project is about – but it’s such a common communications issue anyhow. I’m looking forward to working out a fun way to gamify it.

Nathan

It hasn’t been the easiest week, and after last week’s blitz it was a bit jarring to slow down and wander. I think we’ve gotten really good at working through our creative process, and last week’s productivity was testament to that, but it took me until the end of this week to remember that wandering is an important part of the process too.

I’m thinking about the difference between showing a specific structure of decision-making based on a real life case study, and showing something broader.

I’m thinking about a farmer during a volcanic event asking how long will this last, and having to make awful decisions.

I’m thinking about games that aren’t fun, and how sometimes they can be very fun.

Gillian

Every project has a material or a process you’ll never forget. You’ll be walking through a supermarket and see a container of toothpicks that are exactly perfect for a project you completed three years ago and think “Yahtzee!” before you remember the need has long past. This time it’s going to be origami paper and farm animal shaped pencil erasers. If you see any, let me know?

The primary goal of most design is to support and assist in communicating a concept. For this development I am creating prototype game pieces that can be picked up and played with, and that communicate a sense of location and familiarity that will help players understand the complexities of disaster evacuation. I’ve only been with the team here for a week, but the ideas are starting to take shape:

At the moment, the prototype consists of 5 interlocking tiles that serves as a kind of board which can be broken apart for gameplay in smaller groups. Although this game does not necessarily require a board to play, a board game is a familiar object to most people, and invites the players to touch and interact with the game pieces. The movable but linked tiles allow for mobile gameplay, and represent a linked ecology between the represented areas.

The materials that I am using to create the model for the prototype are also familiar ones, and the most prominent of these is paper. Paper suggests fragility and impermanence to me in a way that works well when illustrating concept of the threat of disasters. It’s also a universal material, is available in designs and patterns that evoke south-east Asian cultures, and can look both old and new depending on treatment. Paper also has the advantage of being both cheap and easy to work with, which is a plus during constant trails and errors of development.

After a week of paper and glue, the Beach Tile is rocking along, and I’ve started working on the model buildings for the City tile. I’m aiming to start the Farm by Tuesday, provided there are enough pencil eraser livestock left in Singapore.

David

I’m just going to second Nathan and Nikki’s comments from above about it being a slow week. But then, I sometimes want to catch myself when I think things like that, because when I say ‘I’m tired’, it becomes a bit of a narrative I tell myself. Last week was easy, this week was tough. And sure, there was a bit of that, but also, good things came through, and there were real moments of pleasure and breakthrough.

The best moments of the week for me have been small ones. I got a couple of hours on Wednesday to do a bit of scripting, and later, a sentence or two of that scripting came in handy when Nathan and Rach made a game about typhoon formation. On Thursday, Muttley pushed forward and ran a large-scales systems mapping process, and I was able to sit quietly and contribute nothing while I circled around some ideas for the most boring game I’ve ever made. (Getting to sit out of the conversation when you’re not feeling it, and it not being seen as a negative, is a really valuable feature of this collaboration – sorely missed in a lot of other settings.) And today, I wanted to write a bit about making the right decisions and getting the wrong outcome – and the exact text I needed was already there, notes from our meeting with scientist David Lallemand.

So the scraps are starting – starting – to come together. Something (sorta) exists which didn’t exist two weeks ago, that’s always a good feeling.

We had a great few days this week, running shows of Best Festival Ever for friends, funders and stakeholders of Miljöverkstan and Democratic Nature. Doing the show at this point in the process was really useful for me, reminding me of some of our goals, how the decisions we make at this point are reflected in a final product, and the joy that comes with sharing these sorts of games and ideas with an audience.

After the Friday show we got to have a long conversation with some people who are not only familiar with the Flaten area, but who work with systems science and environmental data. This is a very useful relationship for us, and one that will only increase in value as we get further into the process.

In the conversation we touched upon a concept that was new to me, that of resilience pivots. When a system is undergoing transformation, there are some parts of the system that don’t transform. The resilience of these parts is what in effect allows the transformation. In considering the transformation of a system, it is valuable to consider which parts stayed resilient as much as it is to consider which parts transformed.

I believe this is an idea better suited to studying past transformations than predicting future ones – though it might help to understand the impact of a suggested transformation. Identifying where in the system resilience will help transformation and where it will hinder could help create opportunities to effect change.

If someone wanted to turn the Flaten area into a big commercial tourist zone, one resilience pivot point might be the clean water and beauty of the lake – these qualities would have to not change for the transformation to work.

I look forward to understanding this better and figuring out nicer examples.

It’s clearly a concept that I’m still getting my head around, but I’m very excited that a few years into this process we’re able to talk to experts and learn more nuanced ideas about systems. It shows how far we’ve come since 2012, and even thought it might not be an idea we end up explicitly communicating in a show about Flaten, it’s a new way to look at the system and a new concept to add to our language of our process.

Here’s a paper that I’ve skimmed through and seems useful, Resilience Pivots: Stability and Identity in a Social-Ecological-Cultural System.

Can the concept of resilience pivots help us to understand past transformations of Flaten, and better articulate potential future ones?

Some of my favourite episodes of the Simpsons are where Bart (it’s usually Bart) recognises that something he’s done has had a profound (usually hurtful) effect on someone. I think realising that your actions can affect others is an important part of growing up as a child, and the Simpsons has a knack for showing these moments in a very earnest way. Bart seeing Mrs Krabappel sitting alone in a restaurant after faking love letters and a dinner invitation comes to mind. Also Bart watching Lisa walk off home from the carnival and realising that he’d gone too far. It’s that moment as a child when you learn to zoom out, perhaps only slightly, and see yourself in a bigger picture.

We’ve spent a lot of time the last week or so discussing an overarching principle for this show about Flaten – some sort of framing that clarifies what the show is trying to do. Something that helps an audience know what they’re going to experience, and to say quite simply, we believe x is important. We’ve been lucky enough this week to share in the knowledge and expertise of some very clever and wonderful people, and these experiences have helped me in grounding some of our ideas.

On Wednesday we had a walk around (and across!!!) the lake with Sarah, who works at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and has run guided tours of Flaten for the last twelve years. She wrote her phd on it!

Sarah told us about how as the land mass of Sweden was formed, plants and animals quickly spread to it – and with them, people. So one can argue that Stockholm (and by extension, Flaten), has pretty much always had people on it. This land has more or less always been managed. Since the beginning it has existed as a socio-ecological system.

This feels kind of weird, at least coming from an Australian perspective – the Australian land mass existed for a long time without people, even though people have been in Australia for tens of thousands of years.

It also connects to the idea that oak forests, which have been around for hundreds of years, come from active land management, and need some level of active land management to survive. Again this feels kind of counterintuitive to me. I think there’s an idea you pick up as a child that if left alone nature will heal and revitalise, but in reality it’s a bit more complicated than that.

So with these and many more ideas bouncing around my head I’ve been trying to clarify at least one aspect of the why for this show.

We have a relationship to the environment we’re in. We influence it and it influences us, in ways both subtle and overt, simple and complex. The area of Flaten has always had a relationship with people, and over time that relationship has changed the system again and again. We have a responsibility, and an opportunity, to make that relationship the best it can be. We can do that by learning about the Flaten system, understanding its complexity, its uniqueness and recognising our own place within it. The more we can do that, the better choices we can make for the system and the better contributions we can make to a future that we want.

Flaten is a pretty unique area, and has a unique relationship with the people that are part of it. How do we ground the show in the uniqueness of the system while speaking to something larger?

Best Festival Ever is a touring show. We pack all the set and prop items into 4 suitcases and 2 art cases, and lug it around in our cars and on planes. It’s fairly heavy and clunky, but we make it work.

There isn’t really a lighting design for the show, as we’re often performing it in board rooms or office floors with no theatre lighting. When we DO get to perform in a theatre, we have the luxury of theatre lighting (thanks Gillian Schwab at Street Theatre!). It lifts the show a lot, and feels a bit special.

As for sound, we enlisted the expertise of Nick McCorriston before our first Australian run to help us move the show’s sound from my old iPod to something a bit easier to use. The solution was to run a BFE Ableton session through my laptop (offstage) into either a PA system or our on-stage mini speakers. The Ableton session is controlled through the Touchable app on my ipad, which we keep in our little ‘presenting’ area on stage with us. It’s MUCH better than the iPod.

The problem is that I am a fool, and forgot to back up my computer before coming overseas.

The problem is that my laptop crashed 20 minutes in to the Kärrtorps Gymnasium show.

The problem is that try as I might, I couldn’t get the computer to restart and get the show back on track – my hard drive was completely dead.

I tried to solve our most pressing issue (no sound for the show we were in the middle of performing) by plugging my iPhone into our on-stage mini speakers and playing ANYTHING to provide backing music to our games. Not a great solution.

Compounding our troubles was the fact that Nathan was performing while sick (what a trooper), and our audience was a tricky one (see previous post).

With the crisp vision of hindsight, I know what we should have done. I should have backed up my computer and brought an external hard drive with me. I should have put the Ableton session onto Nikki AND Nathan’s laptops. We should have each had at least a playlist of the show music on our iPhones for times when something crashes mid-show. These are things we will do in the future.

For now, I’ve just picked my laptop up from the repair show with a brand new, blank hard drive. Tonight, I can set up my laptop from scratch – and can reconsider what I actually WANT from my laptop and set it up in a way that makes things easier for me to study, to work, and to play.

So I’m asking myself some questions that we ask in our systems mapping process – what do I want from my laptop? What do I use it for? Perhaps there are systems I haven’t considered before that would suit my purposes very well, but I have never tried them because sorting through my cluttered documents seemed like an overwhelming task. I’ve been forced to step out of the system that I used to use for several hours a day, see it from a larger perspective and ask new questions of it.

(I’m trying to be positive about the fact that I’ve lost all my data. Fresh start!)

Questions:

What are the systems we use everyday (like laptops) that would benefit from a do-over? A clean slate to build up from scratch?

To answer my own question a bit:

Kitchen pantry and fridge. I know that I am not going to eat trashy food if it isn’t in my house. It is much easier to turn over a new leaf of health and food if I can turn my pantry into a blank slate (ironically this might mean i end up eating a lot of trash in order to start a new ‘healthy’ phase)

Each audience is different. Different ages, backgrounds, levels of science knowledge, investment in our process and our product. Some have contributed resources and/or expertise to Best Festival Ever. Some have no idea what they’re in for. Generally we have an understanding of each audience prior to performing each show. One of the first things we do when unpacking our props is decide who our eight headliner choices will be – this task usually falls to David Finnigan, who will take into consideration our perceived audience demographic as he chooses a spread of artists. We hope to have each audience member be familiar with at least one of the artists in our line-up.

The time of day generally has an impact on our audience – early morning is fairly formal, evening is casual, etc.

At the end of our first week in Stockholm, we performed Best Festival Ever for a group of students from Kärrtorps Gymnasium. These teenagers had been coming to work with Miljöverkstan in Flaten for several months, popping by once a week for a few hours to research the area in small groups.

There are a couple of things we needed to consider in order to perform BFE for this particular audience.

English is their second language – and for some, it is their third or fourth. This means we need to enunciate and slow down a little in our delivery.

They’re not here of their own accord. When performing in a theatre or science centre, we’re usually working with an audience who have chosen to come along of their own volition – they’re interested in the science or the games, or curious about seeing something new. They’re taken a step towards us, and we work to meet them in the middle. With ‘forced’ audiences, we have to take 2 steps to meet them. Not that they’re hostile! They just aren’t on the bandwagon yet.

The jokes won’t land. We wrote the show for an English-speaking audience based in Australia or the UK – there are some jokes and humorous descriptions that some people might get, but most won’t. We have to ride that wave as performers the best we can, and try to keep our energy up without audible laughter.

The trade-offs game may have less discussion of ethics.If our audience doesn’t have brand familiarity with our sponsors, they’re just picking based on weight.

We may have to repeat some instructions

They already have a social structure. Often we’re performing for groups that don’t know each other, and we have built an awareness of the moments where a sense of ensemble is established in the audience. It’s a little different with groups that already have a structure or hierarchy – still interesting for us to observe, though.

They will NOT think we are cool, and might think we’re talking down to them. Teenagers ALWAYS feel as though we’re talking down to them a bit, maybe babying them, by asking them to play systems science games. Adults are much more on board, and often assume that teenagers would LOVE the show.

We need to give audience members their scripts a bit earlier than usual. We have a few bits of dialogue that we ask audience members to read aloud for us. For an English-speaking audience, this is my process:

Rachel: *whispering* Hey, would you be able to read some lines out for me?

Audience: *nods*

Rachel: You’ll be playing ‘Ted’. *points to the highlighted lines* I’ll let you know when to start.

And then I stand a little behind them and give them a little tap on the shoulder when the line just before theirs is wrapping up. For a Swedish audience, I try to give them the text a line or two earlier to give them a bit of reading time.

When performing for an adult audience in Sweden, we still have to take some of these things into consideration – speaking a bit slower, enunciating, etc. Our three shows this week for various stakeholders and systems scientists went really well, and I hope that there wasn’t too much lost in translation.

The biggest problem for our Kärrtorps Gymnasium was my laptop dying mid-show (more on this to come…)

A question to end with:

How can we, as outsiders who don’t speak Swedish, creating a show to be performed in Swedish for a Swedish-speaking audience whose first language MAY NOT even be Swedish, make sure that our work AND the work of Miljöverkstan doesn’t get lost in translation?

So as we near the end of our two week development at Arts House, I want to scribble a few thoughts on the topic of, what is Modelling Play, and why are we doing it. It’s not unusual I think to start developing a work exploring one question or idea and end up somewhere very very different from where you began. In a way I think Modelling Play is well on track with the initial impulse towards this new project back in 2011 – in other ways it’s travelled a huge distance and it’s barely recognisable.

So what is this show? Well it’s an interactive performance for a group of about 20-25 people seated around a table. It’s a theatre show incorporating a lot of elements drawn from board games. It’s a performance lecture exploring concepts from systems science and modelling. It’s the story of a music festival on the edge of disaster and the musicians, audience and crew that try to bring it safely through.

It’s a lot of fun. This is important. The story is funny (if a little too close to comfort for anyone who’s ever had to organise a major event) and the boardgames are exciting and satisfying. This is where boardgaming has jumped ahead of a lot of interactive theatre / live art practice – the best boardgames have really perfected the art of engendering an instantly pleasant interaction. You don’t need to memorise complicated rules or tables, you don’t need to risk your dignity being pulled onto a stage or given instructions you don’t understand. Boardgames – at least the boardgames we’ve been drawing on for this project – focus on creating fun inviting experiences. And that’s what Modelling Play has felt like. We’ve had audiences of all ages and backgrounds in our scratch performances getting excited and invested in building their festival site out of wooden blocks, managing crowds of sugar and getting equipment onstage in time for concerts. It’s always pleasant to see the audience high-fiving each other after achieving something as a team.

But through this residency we’ve come back to the central question of the show, which is the science. We’re not making a show about boardgaming or running your own music festival, as fun as those two things are. The central question is the science. And this is interesting, because I think things have shifted – or maybe it’s better to say, they’ve come into focus.

When I started out in residence at UCL in 2011, the topic of my reseach was ‘Climate and Systems Modelling’. I wanted to better understand what a model was and how it worked, in order to use those concepts as the basis for a show. Which is, in the end, exactly what we’ve done. But what we spent a lot of last year’s residency in London discussing was the difference between:

a) Building a systems model with the audience, and
b) Showing the audience a systems model we’ve constructed

They might seem like fairly similar projects, but the more we talked them through, the more we saw that both variants would teach and convey very different things, as well as being very different experiences. If we wanted to talk about modelling, what it is, why people do it, how it works, variant A would be a better pathway. If we went with variant B, different things would naturally emerge.

So while we’ve flagged the possibility of A as a thing to return to, B is where we’ve gone with this current version of the show. And what we’ve discovered, quite naturally, is that the concepts that lie at the heart of this show are somewhat different to the concepts from modelling we thought we were building the show around.

What we imagined was that Modelling Play would teach an audience what modelling is, how a scientific predictive model is constructed, how a model reflects the system being modelled, what they are useful for and what they are weak in.

Instead, what we’ve done is modelled a complex adaptive system (a music festival), and given the audience a variety of levers and buttons with whch to control that system. And what they learn from that experience is less about modelling than about properties of complex adaptive systems. These properties include things like:

How complex adaptive systems (like a human body, like an ecosystem, like a music festival) are made up of sub-systems that have their own behaviours and properties;

How the different parts of a system are interconnected, and how those links can often operate in surprising and unexpected ways;

How it’s impossible to look at one part of a system in isolation – if you want to understand a system you need to look at the whole picture, all the parts and their interacting behaviour;

The ways in which managing a system is all about trade-offs and compromises – how squeezing the most out of one part of the system will often involve making sacrifices somewhere else;

That a complex system – especially one involving groups of human beings – will often involve different stakeholders who want and value different things from the system, and you need to understand and keep in balance those different priorities if you want to keep the system flourishing;

The idea of a feedback loop – how some parts of the system feed into other parts which feed back again, and so on, and how those loops can sometimes get out of hand. Managing a system often involves trying to dampen feedback loops before they get out of control, and the music festival provides a couple of nice examples of this behaviour;

How a system can easily absorb a whole series of shocks and then suddenly collapse – capably handling a hundred hours of rainfall and then abruptly falling over on the hundred and first. In general, the idea of Resilience – what is it that allows systems to absorb disturbances in some cases but not others?

How complex adaptive systems take place on different scales – and how often dealing with a problem or understanding an issue is a matter of viewing it at the right scale;

A lot of these ideas sound fairly intuitive, or even trivial, and to an extent that’s correct – this show (and systems science in general) isn’t proposing a radical overthrow of everything we know about the universe. Instead it’s about developing our ability to view the world through this perspective, to see when and where it can be useful and how to apply it. For that reason, it was important to us to bring these ideas into a setting where you wouldn’t normally expect to encounter them. It’s relatively easy to see how systems thinking can help make sense of a river catchment or a forest plantation – it’s a little more unusual to consider them in the context of a music festival.

So what is the rationale for building a show around these concepts? Why invest so much time constructing a playable systems demo in the form of an interactive theatre experience? Why is this show important?

Systems science is an interdisciplinary field that looks at the complex systems that exist in nature and society. It encompasses a huge range of ideas and theories across an array of disciplines. Maybe you could describe it as a conceptual framework – at one level, it is a way of analysing the things we see in the world by looking at them in concert rather than separating them. Systems science looks at the links and interactions between things, rather than simply at the things themselves.

Here’s one unambitious reason why you should care about systems science: lots of other people do. If you live in Australia, the USA or Europe, a lot of the decisions your government has made in the last decade or two have been influenced and informed by systems thinking. A huge amount of the scientific research (particularly in areas such as climate science and economics) has come from the systems sciences. This research has affected you, and will continue to affect you, through the decisions of your government and policy-makers. So maybe that’s a reason to be informed about it?

But beyond that, and for me, a far more important reason to care about systems science is that it’s a science about the world we live in. All science is about the world, even the most abstract quantum physics or obtuse mathematics,* but systems science engages with the messiness of the world we live in every day. The interactions between natural ecosystems and built infrastructure. The behaviour of nations and corporations in the political sphere. The way that interactions between individuals gives rise to the unique characteristics of a community or society. It’s messy and it’s relevant and it’s all around us and it’s going to impact you whether you like it or not.

I’m running the risk of sounding like a systems science evangelist, which is not my intention, so let me qualify what I’m saying: I’m not arguing that understanding systems will answer the deep underlying philosophical questions or solve all our problems. But the bottom line is, we exist in complex systems – all of us, every day – and we need better ways of understanding them. And systems science essentially provides some tools with which we can better get to grips with these problems.

What Modelling Play does is take these ideas – about interconnectivity, feedback loops, thresholds, tipping points and resilience – and place them in a real world setting, which is exactly where they belong. The show is not an abstract lecture about the mathematical properties of complex systems (I would not understand it if it were), it’s a show about a music festival in which those properties occur. We don’t instruct the audience about the definition of a trade-off – you know what a trade-off is, you deal with them all the time. What Modelling Play does is point out that maybe trade-offs happen more often in our lives than we often realise. You might look out for them in future and see them in other places and contexts. That awareness might be useful in understanding other situations you encounter in the world.

There is an element of the show in which we discuss these ideas explicitly – I’m a geek at heart, and I can’t help but enjoy the idea of a theatre show with a flowchart in it – but this is a pretty small part of the picture. Not because we’re ashamed of the science or trying to sneak it in sideways, either – I couldn’t be bothered trying to trick people into learning, that sounds depressing and futile – just because we don’t need to spend ages explaining things you already know. What it’s about is saying, ‘This thing happening in the music festival right now, this is an example of a feedback loop. You understand what it is and how it works – here’s some other classic examples of them and why scientists give a shit about them.’

For me, systems science was incredibly exciting because it took things that I already knew or felt and put words to them, placed them in relation to each other and highlighted why they might matter. It’s another way of telling a story about the world. You could view a festival as a unique artistic experience bringing together a once-in-a-lifetime lineup of bands and audiences. You could also view it as a connected set of systems, each with their own behaviour, interacting at a variety of levels and scales. Both are correct, but both focus on different things and tell you different stories.

The joy of Modelling Play for me is that we’ve found a form where those ideas arise naturally. Boardgames, by their very nature, allow you to explore ideas such as trade-offs, tipping points and feedback loops. But at their heart, boardgames are about having fun. So I don’t think we’re sacrificing anything to make this experience.

The other wonderful thing about a music festival is that it’s a setting in which stories arise quite naturally. There’s no doubt that you can tell a gripping and exciting story about managing a river catchment or an agricultural region, but we really gravitated to the music festival setting for the potential for fun and excitement. Because managing this system isn’t just a case of getting the stocks and flows right to ensure production levels are sustained for another year, it’s about getting the bands onstage in good shape and keeping the crowd happy by any means necessary. And when things start to go wrong and the disasters start ricocheting out of hand, it’s a high stakes tale of life and death, catastrophe or triumph.